Sunday, 30 March 2014

Aberdeen was enveloped in an unexpected heatwave over the
weekend, as literally several Scottish Liberal Democrats appeared on the scene,
bringing with them their new “sunshine strategy”.

Leader Wullie Rennie, who will be claiming credit for the
strategy if it works, but will otherwise be a speck of dust on the horizon, peeped
out from behind a huge smiley mask to comment. “We’re just thrilled to celebrate being in
Britain, in government and indistinguishable from the Tories. And what a wonderful platform Aberdeen is for
us, with the Lib Dems having such a great record of delivery in the North
East. Like Domino Pizza, but with more
limp cheesiness.”

What about the critics’ charge that this outpouring of manic
jollity is a cynically engineered ploy to disguise the moral vacuum at the
party’s heart? “Ha ha, well, if you’ve
heard me speak at Holyrood, you’ll know I have no chance of understanding what
you’ve just said. But look, we’re not at
home to Mr Sourpuss. People say we’re faking,
but our position on the Union is something you couldn’t make up. The whole conference hall has a song in its
heart and a smile on its lips, and the laughing gas we’ve been feeding through
the air-con is just a precaution.”

The highlight of the proceedings was the keynote speech by David
Cameron’s personal valet, Nick Clegg, the possessor of a fine old Scottish
surname meaning “bloodsucking insect”.
Mr Clegg, who is fluent in five languages but chose to address the
audience in his mother tongue of Bollocks, was unwavering in his support for
the No campaign’s frantic attempts to discover a positive case for Scotland
staying in the Union.

“The SNP and UKIP are very similar,” declared Mr Clegg, “All
right, they fundamentally disagree on the EU and immigration, and only the SNP
actually has any policies apart from that.
But otherwise they’re like identical twins. Both of them end with the letter P, both are
far more popular than the Lib Dems and both have a leader who can kick my arse
in a debate. Sorry, uncomfortable
memories, so I’ll simply leave the comparison there for everyone to mull over,
and move swiftly on.

“This referendum is about capturing imaginations. It’s easy to wear a Grim Reaper costume and
come out with doom-laden claptrap you’ve just made up, as you’ll find out when
Danny Alexander does that later. But Scotland doesn’t seem to have fallen for it,
so we also need to take people’s imaginations into the wild blue yonder, the universe
filled with unicorns, pixies and fairy dust where everything is made of
chocolate and diabetes is unknown.

“In an uncertain world, there’s strength in numbers. Some numbers are a bit frightening, such as
1.3 trillion, but, if you imagine that the UK debt is a big fluffy snowman and
George Osborne has a magic blowtorch, you can put the worry straight out of
your mind. By contrast, 50 is a nice
number: that’s the number of years we
expect to have North Sea taxes available to camouflage the UK’s Ponzi economy. Another nice number is 0, which is the number
of nuclear warheads currently stationed in Surrey. Er, sorry, this line of argument isn’t
working, is it? Time to move on.

“Scotland has an 8.3% decibel share in the UK’s loud voice
in the G8, or the G7, as it’s called now that Putin’s been suspended for taking
the results of a referendum way too seriously. Imagine the results of that influence! A bottle of Highland Spring in front of each delegate,
apart from Monsieur Hollande, who needs to have Perrier or he’ll set fire to
some tyres. The Prime Minister lightening
the atmosphere during carbon emission negotiations with his hilarious
impression of Billy Connolly discussing farts. Can
Scotland afford to lose that impact at the top table, even though it exists only
in my head?

“Speaking of the G7, look at the UK’s growth, now showing the
highest dead cat bounce of any of them! Yes,
it’s all founded on an out-of-control London property boom, and it’s only a
matter of time before it goes pop and subsides with a squeaky hiss. But just imagine if God had a cosmic joke
with us, and it kept going? We’d be the
largest economy in Europe by 2030, as long as all the other governments inexplicably
decided to pursue rubbish policies. Imagine
Scotland missing out on that, while the rest of us linked hands on Hadrian’s Wall,
or an alternative northern landmark not yet destroyed by fracking, and chanted “losers,
looo-sers” in a northerly direction! Um…
I’m afraid this is getting a bit negative again. Sorry….

“Tell you what, I’ll scrap the Bedroom Tax! Only joking, that’s well above my pay
grade. But I’ll undertake to speak to
the Prime Minister, if I can find some space in his diary, and ask him if he’ll
let you spend more of your pocket money on alleviating its effects. I imagine that’s almost as good as
independence. Isn’t it?

“Actually, we’d offer you and the rest of the provinces Home
Rule in a federal UK, which is what we’ve been banging on about ever since Ming
Campbell first proposed the idea 100 years ago.
But we can’t imagine what it would actually involve, although Ming
suggests giving everyone a free cardigan and a Werther’s Original might be
nice. Frankly, it’s pretty academic,
because after the debacle of the last four years there’s no way the electorate will
ever touch the Lib Dems with a bargepole again.

“Sorry. I’m so very
sorry…..”

At this point a giant shepherd’s crook was deployed to
assist Mr Clegg off stage. As he was being sedated, Wullie Rennie entertained
the dwindling audience with a hastily improvised tap-dance.

The Scottish Liberal Democrats will meet again this time
next year, probably in a bus shelter in Cardenden.

Tuesday, 25 March 2014

I don’t know if the prospect of punters evading the licence
fee without landing in the clink has caused a stramash in BBC Scotland’s
executive bunker, but of late its referendum coverage seems to have inched
closer to even-handedness. It’s hard to
be sure, because I can’t include Labour’s Perth Conference in my stats, since
it turned out to be comedy rather than news.
But there have been a couple of occasions recently where prominent Unionists
have been somewhat discomfited to encounter robust and pertinent questioning,
rather than the usual “Why don’t you spout unchallenged drivel into the
microphone for five minutes while I make us a nice cup of tea?”

I’ve probably kyboshed things now. Jim Naughtie and his sword of truth will be
back on Good Morning Scotland very
soon, itching for an opportunity to announce “And now, Thought For The Day with Blair McDougall”. Still, in a world of rabbit droppings you
have to be grateful for the odd chocolate raisin.

That said, with a charter review on the horizon it’s still a
bit of a stretch to say the Beeb has an interest in disseminating information
that might actually be useful to the electorate. We all know where that leads. The obvious tactic, therefore, is to broadcast
a series of head-to-head debates, with eye-catching personalities adding a
veneer of light entertainment to reel in the viewers. Boxes duly ticked, BBC Trust cooing contentedly
and, if you get the format right, no chance of anyone accidentally being
enlightened. Hence, before our very eyes,
last night’s celebrity smackdown between Jim Sillars and George Galloway on Newsnight Scotland.

They’re certainly an engaging pair of mavericks, and you can
see why the respective campaign leaders might wish to keep them out of the
spotlight, with cattle-prods if necessary.
Any spin doctor trying to convince either of them to toe the party line had
better have a good therapist on speed-dial.
Both advocate a form of socialism that would make Ed Miliband
spontaneously combust, and both, if Alex Salmond walked out into the road in
front of them, might struggle to remember which pedal was the brake.

Jim’s now been a member of three political parties, thanks
to the rare characteristic of having rock-solid principles, and is so detached
from the present-day SNP that he’s practically on St Kilda. He’s a
master of the type of ringing phrase that makes you think “poet” rather than “smartarse”. His vision of Scotland’s future, In Place Of Fear II, evoking the spirit
of Nye Bevan’s hymn to the Welfare State, makes Anas Sarwar’s recently
trumpeted “red paper” look like The
Ladybird Book of Pissing About. This
is not a man in whose face you slam the door, unless you want it to fall off
its hinges.

Coincidentally, George has also been in three parties, if
you include the G Galloway Worship Party.
He devoured Roget’s Thesaurus
at an early age, possibly force-fed by classmates who found him irritating, and
has been famous ever since for his rhetorical flourishes, although the queue
behind him at the Co-Op checkout has not always appreciated these. We all enjoyed
his finest hour, when he memorably slapped a hostile US Senate Committee all
round Capitol Hill, but I suspect not many of us would accept a used car from
him, even if he offered it free and threw in £500 for fuel.

The two stood at their respective lecterns facing the inquisitorial
panel: Gary Robertson, who obviously
never sleeps, Isabel Fraser, whom we all feared had been kidnapped, and Laura
Bicker, revelling in having such an appropriate surname for a referendum
correspondent. Jim was in conventional
jacket and tie and George in a tuxedo and wing collar, looking like he’d just breezed
in from a champagne reception, even though he doesn’t drink, because his ego is
intoxicating enough.

The debate itself was a bit of a jaw-dropper. George charges £12 a throw for his anti-independence
roadshow Just Say Naw, as if he’d
ever be so monosyllabic himself, so we were looking for all sorts of zingers
from his script. Instead, all we got was
the standard Better Together bilge-fest:
Alex Salmond, currency, SNP, banks leaving, banks needing bailed out
anyway, Alex Salmond, border posts, Alex Salmond, shipyard job losses, SNP, oil
running out, oil crashing, Alex Salmond, NATO forcing Scotland to keep Trident,
yadda yadda. He even trotted out Mr Barroso, now officially enshrined in the
Oxford English Dictionary under “busted flush”!
Sorry, George, if that’s your entire argument I want my money back and you’re
lucky I haven’t set BBC Rogue Traders
on you.

To be fair, there was a bit
more: we were treated to an exchange of
catch-phrases. George stole Jim’s “nonsense
on stilts”, which Jim had used to describe currency union. George, naturally, expanded it to encompass
the whole idea of self-determination, a concept great for Palestine but
disastrous for Scotland. Later Jim hit
back, pulling a note from a breast pocket George’s tuxedo didn’t have, and
reminding his opponent of the time he’d described his pro-Union Labour and Tory
bedfellows as “two cheeks of the same backside”. That’s probably not the exact terminology with
which George regaled a grateful Oxford Union, but remember, Jim’s a gentleman.

Well, kind of. There
was a moment when Jim cheekily wondered aloud if George could suggest a home
for Trident south of the border, since he was an “English MP”, whereupon the
Gorgeous One threw a contrived anti-racist strop. Oh, the infamy! The nonsense removed its stilts and started
bouncing about on a pogo stick.

It was noticeable that Jim seemed to become more authoritative
as the discussion wore on. He even snuck
in a positive word for EFTA, simultaneously short-circuiting George’s tedious “ooh,
we’ll be up a gum tree with the EU” argument and sending thousands of viewers
scurrying to Wikipedia to find out what the hell EFTA was. George, meanwhile, got progressively louder
and boomier, as if he was announcing the last train home. Metaphorically, perhaps he was.

And Jim did produce the night’s most memorable phrase: that Scotland was in the process of shaking
off its greatest handicap, the “myth of inadequacy”. Not to
mention the most head-scratchingly optimistic statement: that after a Yes vote Scottish Labour would
arise rejuvenated “with Middle England off its back” and win the 2016 election. With Monty Python’s parrot running them a
close second, no doubt.

So, in my own little opinion poll of one, I hereby award the
points for last night’s tête-a-tête to Jim, while George leaves with
nothing. Except his undying affection
for himself, and the controversy that constantly dogs his footsteps.

Of course, in complete contrast to the BBC, I’m totally
biased. Please feel free to send me your
complaints about lack of balance. My
reply will be similar in content to their standard response, but slightly more
succinctly worded.

“SCOTLAND will be worse off than the rest of the UK
to the tune of £1000 per person in the years immediately following Alex
Salmond's proposed date of independence, according to an analysis published
today.”

Next!

Johann Lamont, Labour Perth Conference, 23 March 2014:

“There is one thing which the First Minister has discovered this
year. Women give birth to children. Then they look after them. So when his focus groups tell him women don’t
like him, he discovers child care.”

Next!

Sunday Telegraph, 23 March 2014:

“The Scottish National Party’s plans for
the country’s economy post-independence have been dismissed as “a few windmills
and hydro power” by one of the UK’s leading businessmen.”

Next!

The Scotsman, 21 March 2014:

“An independent Scotland may end
up accepting an “off the shelf” deal to join the EU with “significantly worse”
terms and conditions than it currently enjoys, the Scottish Secretary has
claimed.”

Next!

The Herald, 24 March 2014:

“Conservative Cabinet
minister Ken Clarke has claimed a Yes vote in the independence referendum would
"revive the medieval state of Scotland"…. Mr Clarke, 73, also referred repeatedly to the
independence ballot as the "devolution vote" and said it was in May,
rather than in September.”

Next!

Daily Telegraph, 23 March 2014:

“An independent Scotland
faces giving up the pound and higher borrowing costs, according to an analysis
by the world’s largest fund manager…. A 12-page analysis of the ramifications
of leaving the UK also raised the prospect of higher interest rates, financial
services jobs moving south of the Border and cuts to public spending.”

Friday, 21 March 2014

In a body-blow for the No campaign, Ed Miliband today
entered the independence debate at the Labour Party’s Perth conference with a heartfelt
declaration of love for Scotland.

“My father trained with the Royal Navy at Inverkeithing,” the
Labour leader fondly reminisced. “It
instilled in him a huge affinity with Scotland, although he never made it back there
because for the rest of his life he was really busy. But he always had a special smile for lucky
white heather sellers, and a high tolerance for bagpipe music. I remember my conversation with him as a boy,
when he said to me, ‘Son, when you’re Prime Minister don’t forget to suck up to
the Jocks. They’ll vote for any old rubbish if it wears a red rosette’. And I said to him, ‘Dad, I’m Ed. You’re mixing me up with David again.’

“Only Labour can restore the 50p top tax rate in Scotland,”
Miliband continued, “because by the time we’re finished with the economy
nobody will be earning enough to pay it anyway.
Under independence Alex Salmond would find himself competing with David
Cameron in a race to the bottom, whereas within the Union we would pool and
share the collapse of the economy so that everyone suffered equally.

“John Smith, whom respected mediums have confirmed to us
would definitely have voted against independence, passionately believed in
social justice. So magnificent was his vision that it’s taken us twenty years
to come up with a plan to implement it. But
we’re ready now, as long as the opinion polls don’t go tits up.

“Alex Salmond used to call himself a social democrat. He can’t any more, because we’ve debased
politics so much in the last few years that the term’s meaningless. Now that we’ve made punters think all politicians
are the same, I can call him a Tory without anybody batting an eyelid. Why put up with him making life easier for
rich people with obscenities like free university tuition and prescription
charges, when you can vote for us, and ensure 10,000 extra civil service jobs
administering a means-tested quagmire?

“Anyway, it’s time for my oil change, and then I have a train
to catch. Bye!”

Mr Miliband’s speech came after Scottish Labour’s new “red
flag” policy document Together We’re Crap
had been unveiled by deputy Scottish leader Anas Sarwar in a five minute speech
that lasted for four hours. The document will be mailed to all Scottish households at the expense of Aberdeen council tax payers. It has several key planks, many of whom helped to write it.

“It’s about something bigger than independence,” indicated
Sarwar, practising circular breathing to make sure no-one else got a word in
edgeways. “It’s about adventure, ambitions, aspiration, assertions, assistance,
assumptions and astonishment, and that’s only page 62 of the dictionary we’re
at. The SNP waste so much time on mundane
delivery of policies, when they could be dreaming the dream like only Labour
can. Wake up, Scotland!

“Our proposals will halve child poverty by 2021. We figure that by then about 40% of those
currently affected will no longer be children, so we only have to worry about
the other 10%. So we’ll offer a few hours
of free childcare to 2, 3 and 4 year olds and then re-define “poverty” to
exclude families in receipt of childcare.
Job done!

“We’ll finance it by punishing better off people for living
in Scotland by levying higher taxes than the rest of the UK. If enough of them bugger off to Carlisle,
average wealth in Scotland will go down, so people will be relatively less poor
anyway.

"Johann’s done the sums and says 100 million people will
benefit from our proposals, or maybe it’s 10, but the arithmetic doesn’t
matter. Jackie Baillie will be in charge
of publicity, since she’s a face that everyone can trust.”

Thursday, 20 March 2014

Once we start deciding everything for ourselves, will Scots
miss the theatricality of Budget Day?

The
line-up of shop-window dummies outside Number 11, with the Chancellor holding
up the red briefcase that, unbeknownst to all, contains only sandwiches and a rolled-up
newspaper. The 300-yard limo drive to
the House of Commons, expensively filmed by the BBC from a helicopter because
they’ve got your TV licence money, so bollocks to you! The adversarial ranks of testosterone-addled
louts, immune from everyday concerns, bellowing insults at each other and kept
at bay only by an improbably pint-sized Speaker.

Then there’s the tradition that permits the Chancellor a
drink of his choice during the speech, the only time alcohol’s allowed at the
despatch box. In their day Brown and Darling opted
for mineral water, which was fine, because I wouldn’t like to see either of
them too excited. Kenneth Clarke, who
would rather have been lying back with headphones listening to Miles Davis, endured
his ordeal with the aid of whisky.
Gladstone drank “sherry and beaten egg”, although he may have been secretly
chastising himself for some personal misdemeanour. George Osborne’s tipple looks like water, though
it wouldn’t surprise me if it were actually the tears of the poor.

It’s very different from Holyrood, where there’s plenty of knockabout
humour and gnashing of teeth to titillate the public gallery, especially when
Johann Lamont is confronted with matters of detail, but nothing so compelling
in dramatic terms. Still, there’s
nothing in my life these days to approach the thrill of Thunderbirds, Marvel Comics or sherbet dabs, either. But that’s all
right, because I’ve grown up.

There’s no doubt that George enjoys being in the spotlight,
and not just because it helps to disguise his otherwise vampiric complexion. It’s a great opportunity for him to put the
boot in while others can only watch helplessly, summing up in one bravura
performance the whole outlook of the Coalition Government. His wickedest moment yesterday came when he
announced funding for celebrations of the 800th anniversary of the
Magna Carta, which he reminded us was the story of a weak leader, who betrayed
his brother and was bullied by powerful barons.
The House erupted into laughter, as in response Ed Miliband's control chip activated his “smile” app
while he waited for Ed Balls to explain the joke to him.

George was particularly pleased with himself this year,
because the economy had grown to the point where he could afford to buy the
Office For Budget Responsibility a new dartboard for its forecasts. Naturally, he attributed this to austerity, a
brilliant economic strategy that he would gladly enshrine in the Constitution,
if only the UK had one. That’s as may
be, but if I smash you to a pulp with a baseball bat, and you subsequently
recover sufficiently to live a normal life, it doesn’t make me an orthopaedic
surgeon.

The Treasury’s “lazy stereotype” unit had obviously told George
that potential UKIP voters were mainly elderly people with piggy banks, because
he unleashed a massive love-bomb on savers and pensioners. When he announced that £15,000 annual ISA limit,
I’ll bet the champagne corks were popping in Easterhouse. As for easing restrictions on retirees, allowing
them to blow their entire pension pot on drink and drugs, what a splendid boot
in the knackers for annuity providers! Standard
Life must be considering moving to Sevastopol, where the outlook is more
certain.

Any senior citizens needing to offload some cash might want to pop
down to the bingo, where their local hall had its tax bill cut in half, or to the pub, where for the second year in a row
George ran a “buy 300, get one free” offer on pints of beer.

The Tories were so proud of these concessions to the proles
that their resident idiot, Grant Shapps, decided to publish a colourful poster claiming
credit for helping folk “do more of the things they enjoy”. Unfortunately, as Twitter went into meltdown,
it soon became clear that what they enjoyed was humiliating the Tories for talking
patronising pish. I don’t yet know under
which of his many false names Grant will appear in the soon-to-be-published Great PR Gaffes Of All Time, but I’ll try
to find out once my sides stop hurting.

With a significant expression of Scottish voters’ wishes
falling due in six months, we were agog to see how George would play things. We already knew that the pound we weren’t
going to be allowed to have would be changing, taking on the shape, and by 2017
possibly also the value, of the old threepenny bit. What noise would the new coin make, we
wondered, as it clunked ineffectively into the reject tray of a slot machine? Would there be compensation for people whose
jacket pockets would be destroyed? After
independence, would Scottish engineering firms still be allowed to build the
new fleet of supermarket trolleys?

In the end, George didn’t offer Scotland much in the way of
bribery. I think we’re just not his
type, dear. And we could have done
without the little victory jig when he indicated that North Sea tax receipts
were lower than forecast. However, at
least he didn’t raise whisky duty above its present eye-popping level, and Scottish
firms did share in his attempts to breathe life into the corpse of UK manufacturing. He even tweaked Air Passenger Duty a little,
although not enough for the BBC to start pressing Willie Walsh to recant his
views on independence. Yet.

As for the inevitable stiletto, we were too busy watching
George’s lips to notice it being inserted between our ribs. Buried deep within the crannies of the Red
Book was the reduction, in real terms, of Scotland’s block grant for the coming
year. John Swinney is an equable chap, but
I’m sure he must sometimes want to sneak into a private sound-proofed cubicle
and unleash a blood-curdling primal scream.

Well done, James Cook of BBC Scotland, for spotting that little
piece of jiggery-pokery. There is hope
for you and your colleagues yet. Now chair
a TV debate where Better Together aren’t permitted to lie their socks off, ye
wee scamp!

As with all Budgets, we’re now in the honeymoon period. First impressions never reflect the full
horror that lies slumbering within the Red Book. However, it’s good to see that George has
already put the ever-willing Danny Alexander in place as a human shield for the
coming storm, whatever form it may take. Let’s see how long his zealous infatuation
with the Tories survives that.

Barring unimaginable political upheaval, George will be back
for another dramatic extravaganza next March.
Will it be his finale as far as Scotland is concerned, or the start of a
series of increasingly irritating curtain calls?

One ballot paper, one question, one moment in
history. You know what to do.

Wednesday, 19 March 2014

Did you miss that
ground-breaking Labour Devolution Commission report, telling us what new powers
they might have in store for Scotland after a “No” vote if Ed Miliband doesn’t
screw up the 2015 General Election and they can still be bothered? Never mind,
here it is again.

PISS-POOR POWERS

Accounting for Strengthability
and Peopling Empowerment

FOREWORD

by J Lamont,
Leader (for the time being), Scottish Labour

Scottish Labour is a party of both cynicism and
opportunism. For over 100 years, Labour
has led the argument for Scottish subservience within the Union, and it is a cause
we have advanced out of a deep-seated need to give otherwise unemployable politicians
a wee sook on the gravy train. That is
why it was a Labour Government which set up the Scottish Parliament, delivering
on what Tony Blair memorably called “shutting up these Scotch wankers for good,
with any luck”.

In making the case for devolution, Labour has brought an
enhanced set of buzz-words into the debate and caused significant puzzlement among
the interviewers of BBC Scotland. Our
desire has always been a simple one: meeting the Scottish people’s legitimate
desire for more powers with a smug assurance from Jackie Baillie that everything’s
fine and anything they can’t do is all the SNP’s fault.

Scottish Labour needs the United Kingdom. Look at our leadership, for pity’s sake! You wouldn’t trust any of us to go to the
shops for a pint of milk. Without e-mails
from Ed Miliband’s junior advisers telling us what to do, or our weekly
dressing down from Ian Davidson and Jim Murphy, we’d be sunk. So the questions for us today are what sort
of con trick we need to fool the voters into thinking we’re competent, and
whether Brian Taylor can keep a straight face while hyping it up on Reporting Scotland.

The Scotland Act 2012 represents a major step in this
direction, despite Alex Salmond flippantly telling everybody it’s rubbish, and
it was the aim of this commission to go much further. Unfortunately, our English colleagues told us
we weren’t allowed to, so instead we’ve just photocopied the Act, Tipp-Exed out
some of the figures and replaced them with slightly higher ones.

It is clear, from reading the Daily Mail online comments and the collected writings of Alan
Cochrane, that absolutely no-one in Scotland wants independence. I fully expect this to be confirmed by the
news brought to me in my padded cell on 19 September. We do not, of course, take this outcome for
granted, but Ian Davidson seems pleased with Westminster’s plans for handling
the postal vote and I’m no’ goanny risk a doing by arguing with him.

Politics to me has never been about abstract debates; you
need empty sound-bites as well. I came into politics to tear down barriers,
not erect borders. It has always been
about how to make people’s lives better.
Something for nothing. Didnae say
that. Astonished. We can achieve more working together than we
can ever do alone. As people, we are not
fixed in isolation. We are family. I’ve got all my sisters with me. I’m genetically programmed: British, a Scot, a Hebridean, a Glaswegian,
clueless, and proud!

It was never the intention of devolution to devolve power to
the Scottish Parliament, only to see it accumulate powers upwards. I’ve got no idea what that actually means,
but let’s have a conversation about it anyway.

Oh, wait a minute, someone’s just whispered in my ear that it’s
about “empowering communities”. We’re
going to give Aberdeen City Council the legal right to plant a custard pie in
Alex Salmond’s face every time he shows up within a 40-mile radius. In fact, we’ll make it mandatory, so they can’t
wimp out of it. That’s what re-invigorating
local democracy is all about.

I’d like to thank the Commission for letting me know what’s
in the report, and I’m sure it’ll stand me in good stead for the TV interviews later. Thanks
in advance to the Labour Party for your forthcoming endorsement of the report at
the Perth Conference. You are going to
approve it, aren’t you?

REPORT RECOMMENDATIONS:

Scotland to be given additional things to pay for, using
pretty well the same amount of money as before.
Or maybe less, if electoral pressures force us to bin the Barnett
Formula altogether. The Scottish
Government shouldn’t whinge, though, because we’ll compensate by giving it
powers to increase income tax to ruinous levels.

Other tax receipts, including those from the second great
oil boom, to continue to flow to Westminster, where they will be pooled and
shared among selected millionaires.

BBC3 to be replaced by a “Let’s Laugh At Scotland” channel, featuring
Andrew Neil and a constant flow of uninformed celebrities. Pointless
to be moved to the new channel, and broadcast live from Holyrood.

Scottish Labour to criticise the Scottish Government for all of this
at every turn, while continuing to promote candidates so useless they’re in no
danger of accidentally getting into office.

Tuesday, 18 March 2014

Six months to go! Get
your referendum personality bingo cards out, folks, it’s time for you to be
subjected to some new voices in the debate.

Look, everyone, here’s Charles Kennedy! He’s someone for whom people have a lot of
time, although most of them refer to it as “the past”. For those of you that were missing him, he’s just
finishing a stint as Rector of Glasgow University, a job you can easily combine
with being in hiding. However, unlike
his equally invisible successor, Ed Snowden, he hasn’t actually blown the
whistle on anyone yet. I imagine
whistle-blowing is quite difficult when your jaw’s constantly on the floor at the
sight of the party you once led zealously endorsing economic vandalism.

Anyway, Charlie’s keen political antennae have found a queue
of roughly 5.3 million people who think the “No” campaign is too negative, and
he’s decided to join it. Better Together
shouldn’t be grizzly bears growling at the public, he maintains; they should be
care bears painting a picture of the Union’s benefits in lovely pastel shades.

Of course, they’d first need to conduct a
comprehensive search for such benefits, possibly at sub-atomic level, but if
they did manage to identify some, however frivolous, Charlie says these would need
to be presented to voters “coherently”. As
he probably knows, this could best be achieved by kidnapping Alistair Darling,
flying him out to the South Pole, where only penguins would be freaked out by
his wittering, and replacing him as Better Together mouthpiece with a clever
yet avuncularly laid-back debater such as…. oh, I don’t know… the Rt Hon C
Kennedy MP, perhaps. Could Charlie be
angling to be a bonnie prince again?

Charlie’s well past the stage where he expects anyone
actually to listen to him, but even he must have been taken aback by how
off-message Jim “Why The Long Face” Murphy was when he galumphed into the
debate yesterday. Jim hides his personal
charm well, particularly in his dealings with every other member of the human
race, but he does have a wry sense of humour, which sneakily emerged when he of
all people referred to the SNP as “fake socialists”.

Jim is old-school Better Together, in that he thinks “Vote
my way and you won’t get your face smashed in” constitutes a positive message,
and can’t understand how people have the cheek to believe otherwise. The sub-section of voters he chose to
fear-bomb was the “working poor”, a group that he and his Labour colleagues had
spent 13 years assiduously creating. These
were plumbers, cleaners, nurses, bus drivers – terms that meant little to him,
since he’d never had a proper job in his life, but, according to his advisers, real
occupations.

They, and anyone else with a modicum of sense, might have
concluded that the UK, where Oxfam had identified five families whose combined wealth was equal to that of the poorest 20% of the population, was about
as crappy an economic model as you could imagine. Not so, crowed Jim, dancing about in a scary
bed-sheet like this week’s Scooby-Doo
villain. According to recent projections by fantasists, with independence things could
get far worse.

Mortgages, credit card charges and shopping bills would shoot
up into the stratosphere, and even if they didn’t, we’d have no currency of any
sort to pay them! There would be no jobs
for anyone, especially Scottish Westminster MPs! The contents of honest working people’s
window boxes would mutate into Triffids and devour them, if asteroids didn’t
selectively destroy their homes first! For
pity’s sake, was Alex Salmond’s vanity project really worth this?

It would have been compelling stuff, if listened to with an
uncritical ear in front of a pile of mind-altering drugs. Unfortunately for Jim, his immediate audience
was Hayley Millar of Good Morning
Scotland, the morning after the BBC memo had gone out saying they’d better
make an example of some No representatives to even things up. It was difficult to counter Hayley’s diplomatically-worded
argument that, on the basis of his own party’s catastrophic track record, Jim
was a scaremongering, cynical toad whose delusions of adequacy merited urgent
medical attention. The best he could manage
in response was a softly-spoken snarl, which died away pitifully as she triumphantly handed him his arse.

We’re looking forward to Hayley’s future work, although I
fear that from now on it may be limited to traffic reports. She would have been the most newsworthy BBC
employee of the week, were it not for the previous day’s stushie surrounding
Andrew Marr.

Of course there’s no substance to the charge that in his
fireside chat with Mr Salmond he ventured his own opinion, or that of the BBC. As the Beeb stated in their cut-and-paste dismissal
of the resultant tsunami of complaints, Mr Marr is a senior journalist with a
Cambridge degree, and the BBC is a venerable British institution of
unimpeachable impartiality, so of course
they don’t deal in opinions. Everything
they say is A Fact, Because It Just Is, OK?

The row brilliantly masked the BBC’s real triumph of the
day, which was the discovery of how to nullify troublesome agitators such as Alex. Simply interview him remotely, bouncing the
signal off Venus, round the back of Alpha Centauri and through a traffic jam on
the Kessock Bridge, and the resultant time delay will make it look as if he’s
got no idea how to answer your questions.
Nice work, Auntie.

All of which brings me to the final new voice of the last few days: a purveyor of surreal, chaotic
humour that appears to be stream-of-consciousness nonsense made up on the spot,
but actually took several months to craft.
No, I’m not talking about Eddie Izzard and his upcoming “Please Don’t Go”
concert in Edinburgh, funny as that may be in a kind of sad way. I mean Labour’s Devolution Commission, which today
finally cranked out a list of things they think Scotland should be allowed to
control, if Labour MPs don’t mind too much.

But that’s a tale for another time, when I’ve finally
stopped laughing.

Thursday, 13 March 2014

It’s only two weeks since North Sea oil was such a fantastic
investment that it looked set to keep the South East in infrastructure projects
and Cabinet ministers’ chums in gold-plated bath-taps for years to come. But all of a sudden, now that the latest GERS
report’s come flying through the window wrapped around a brick, it’s a dodgier
business proposition than Del-Boy and Rodney flogging a lorryload of inflatable
dolls at Peckham Market.

Of course, the figures are a game-changer, if you ignore
every single one of the last four years, close your eyes to the bleedin’
obvious special circumstances, remove your brain with an ice-cream scoop and
replace it with cushion stuffing. Speaking
of which, isn’t it wonderful to see Iain Gray back on the BBC,
sharing his child-like vision of the world with a grateful public?

At Pacific Quay, moves are afoot to commemorate Douglas
Fraser’s heroic efforts in interpreting the report for us, by permanently displaying
a scribbled-on fag packet in a glass case in the lobby. Elsewhere, there’s unbridled joy amongst those
who love Scotland to bits, but would rather it remained in the shortbread tin
where it can’t embarrass them. Alistair
Darling, more relaxed than he’s been for aeons, has donned a pair of shades and
intends to spend the day zipping round Edinburgh on a scooter saying “Ciao” to
passers-by. In Aberdeen, meanwhile, a
house-to-house search for copies of the White Paper is under way, as councillors
look forward to a massive celebratory bonfire with optional naked frolicking.

So was Sir Ian Wood just taking the piss when he produced
that report about the North Sea having a future? “Yeah, couldn’t be bothered doing the work,
so I just wrote the first thing that came into my head. You should have seen Jim Naughtie’s
face! Pure beetroot, he went. Had to stab myself with a paper-clip to stop
myself laughing. The oil’s buggered
really, won’t last much beyond 10 pm on 18 September if you ask me. Unless the UK Parliament slips in a change to
the territorial border to make it run northwards from Carnoustie to the Arctic
Circle. That might keep things going a
bit longer.”

Jings! What do the
oil companies think? Why bother with
this exploration thing if it’s so hopeless? Maybe they’ve got a sentimental attachment
to fighting losing battles? “Wait a
minute, chaps, this oil’s flowing a bit too easily for my liking. Why don’t we replace all the pipes with used-up toilet rolls, to make it interesting?
Or, even better, let’s stop drilling altogether and just send frogmen
down to hack at the sea bed with teaspoons.”

And what about the £14.4 billion investment the
conglomerates ploughed into the North Sea during 2012-13? “Yep, that was a bit of a horse’s arse. But, to be fair, the initial e-mail we got was
very convincing, and the “How To Send The Money” web page had proper bank
details and everything, and they did send each of us a nice embossed certificate. It’s
tax-deductible anyway, so Osborne will probably just chuck a few more poor
people on the fire and forget about it.”

So, despite all the signs we naively thought were positive, it
would appear the oil industry is in fact about to collapse in a heap, like a
drunken camel attempting to ice-skate.
Except for viewers in the OPEC countries, who expect to benefit from price
rises in the next few years, and Norway, where they’re too well-mannered to be
smug about their oil fund, and indeed every other country on the planet that
isn’t run by over-promoted toffs whose greed is matched only by their
incompetence.

Well, you know what?
Oil was, is, and ever shall be a bonus. If, uniquely among our species, we can’t make
money from it, we’ll leave it in the ground.
(“Ooh, God will start charging you rent!” warns the pipsqueak Danny
Alexander.) What’s really impressive about yesterday’s
GERS figures, unless you’re Eeyore’s first cousin spouting unchallenged mince
on Newsnicht, is that you can take a
wrecking ball to North Sea revenues and still end up with Scotland in a position
broadly the same as the rest of the UK. That’s
a decent enough starting point for us to make something of it.

We already know we’ll start out with a deficit, and whether
or not it’s per capita larger than the UK’s, on the basis of one iffy snapshot
out of the last five, is mind-blowingly irrelevant. Maybe it’ll be smaller than we think, since
debt interest could be anywhere between £4 billion and diddly-squat, depending on how idiotic Westminster decides to be, and some of the other GERS expenditure attributed to Scotland
looks a tad steep. I mean, £3 billion
for defence, when the blustering Hammond allows Russian ships to roam unchecked
with only Ian Davidson and his bayonet to protect us?

Maybe things really will be squeaky tight, and we’ll have a
tough task to balance the books. But, even if
busting out of the Westminster stranglehold isn’t enough to avoid austerity, I’d
still rather have the likes of John Swinney taking a sensitive approach to it
than Osborne or Balls imposing ideologically-driven mayhem on whoever can’t
fight back. (Other Scottish politicians
are, of course, available. If the people
are smart enough to vote for independence, I expect them to be smart enough to
avoid electing numpties. Otherwise it’s
like spending a fortune on loft installation, then smashing all of your
windows.)

So there. Do your
worst, Better Together, whatever foul blast from the cheeks of Beelzebub you
plan to unleash on us in the next few days.
Your ammunition’s beginning to run out, and we haven’t even begun to
fight yet.

Friday, 7 March 2014

Weren’t the Oscars a disappointment? Faced with the planet’s foremost assembly of emotionally
incontinent attention-seekers fuelled by mind-altering substances, the No campaign
couldn’t persuade even one of them to
supply a vacuous sound-bite about Scotland staying in the UK! We were treated to the biggest “selfie” in
history, and there wasn’t an embarrassing tartan jacket in sight, nor a single designer
handbag with a petite Union Jack poking coquettishly out.

I suppose it’s possible the silly buggers entrusted the flag
to Liza Minnelli, only for her to end up hopping about in frustration at the
back of the photo group, searching in vain for a stepladder. But if we move back into reality, the
truth is obvious: they’ve called off the
love-bombing because they just don’t fancy us any more. Perhaps it was our constant references to
Norway that put them off, or our indiscreet hand gestures during Dave’s
Olympics address.

The violins may have stopped playing, but the bombardment continues. Now it’s a barrage of bouncing bombs,
skittering along the river towards the dam of Scottish self-confidence. “You’ll be uniquely unable to use any
currency whatsoever.” “You’ll be chucked
out of the EU, but mysteriously be bound by its rules.” “You’ll be walking away from the BBC…. oh,
hang on, maybe that’s a good thing…”

In fact they’re not really bombs, but giant balloons filled
with noxious gas, much like the people who launch them. Anybody capable of sharpening a pencil can easily
pop them, albeit never loudly enough for the mainstream media to notice. But we’re dealing with the UK establishment, where
you earn a gong by repeating the same crap over and over again, so the balloons
keep coming. The last week or so has
brought an exciting new trend, where many of the balloons have sported a “highly
respected” company logo and, according to the BBC, carried the message “Vote
Yes and get the sack, losers!”

That's because it’s the corporate reporting season, when, as a
condition of the pen-pushers signing off on their accounts, companies must draw
attention to any risks they believe will affect operations. Even though the UK economy is a Ponzi scheme teetering
on the edge of meltdown, they’re not allowed to cast aspersions on the status
quo. Independence, on the other hand, is
just the ticket to set alarm bells jangling, especially if it means a firm
might be properly regulated and any fraudsters thrown in the clink for a
change.

This is particularly relevant for the financial sector,
which a couple of weeks ago was a ravening monster whose demands would suck
Scotland dry, but is now a pillar of national prosperity we can’t afford to
lose. Hence the hullaballoo about
Standard Life “threatening Scottish jobs”, even though that’s not really news,
because they sack people all the time, especially when the directors’ bonus
pool needs topping up.

Similarly, Alliance Trust, tiptoeing on to the scene today with
a bland statement about forming additional companies, soon found themselves
waving in the wind on top of the media flagpole, as commentators sucked their
teeth in concern. By contrast, Aviva, through
the brilliant stratagem of announcing they weren’t fussed about independence,
guaranteed themselves peace and privacy for the duration of the campaign.

It’s difficult to conceive of any situation that can’t be
made more annoying by the intervention of a banker. Sure enough, an old Square Mile chum of Robert
Peston popped his head out of the trough the other day to deliver a sly
tip-off. While looking for buried
treasure, he’d found a cobweb-encrusted piece of European legislation,
forgotten by everyone and never tested in the courts. After some restoration work with Tipp-Ex and
a felt pen, lo! the magic document proclaimed
that upon independence RBS and Lloyds would have to move their head offices from
Edinburgh to London. Surprisingly,
Robert assumed we’d interpret this as bad news, whereas it actually prompted a
surge in sales of pitchforks and firebrands as we prepared to help them on
their way.

In opposing independence, oil companies are on the sort of
sticky wicket that defies all lubrication.
As soon as they praise the UK as a bastion of stability and continuity, it’s
a fair bet that Osborne will move the taxation goal-posts again and UKIP will have
a five-point boost in the opinion polls. They also know that it would be a bugger of a
job to extract the oil, transport it into English waters, bury it and extract
it again, just to keep in with the chancers at Westminster.

So the oil sector’s comments about independence tend to be
restricted to remarks by chief executives, whose grasp of the real world slipped away long ago. Bob Dudley’s pro-Union views in a BBC
interview were sentimental claptrap, albeit carefully judged to mask his own diabolical
performance at BP. Still, at least they
were internally consistent, unlike those of Ben van Beurden, who at Shell’s
annual reception waxed lyrical about the certainty provided by the EU, but didn’t
notice that a Yes vote might be the best way to prevent it being flushed down
the toilet. Perhaps he was simply reading
from the script Mr Cameron left behind after the Cabinet had finished posing in
Shell’s Aberdeen offices.

And so it goes on, and on, and on. The nay-sayers in the mainstream media are in
clover here, because unless a company has something to gain from independence, such
as British Airways hoping for Air Passenger Duty cuts, it isn’t going to leap
on the Yes bandwagon in its annual report, any more than it would eulogise
about its favourite colour or Kylie Minogue single. So the best we can hope for is neutrality,
although that hope seems somewhat forlorn when so many company boards are
festooned, like Standard Life’s, with former Thatcher acolytes. “What would Maggie do?” they ask themselves,
and the answer’s always “Knee Scotland in the balls!”

Meanwhile, a million miles from the microphones and the
lurid headlines, membership of the pro-independence group Business For Scotland
has hit 1400 and continues to rise. They’re
mainly small enterprises, trying to make a living for their owners and the
ordinary folk they employ, so they needn’t expect Westminster to give them so
much as the time of day. But they have a
clear glimpse of something that’s plainly in front of us, when it isn’t
obscured by the Unionist propaganda that surrounds us like a cloud of midges.

Hope, not fear.
Opportunity, not risk. A decent
society, not an austerity-ridden hellhole.

And maybe, just maybe, the chance of a Saltire in next year’s
Oscars selfie.

Tuesday, 4 March 2014

Hello, dear readers! I'm still chiselling away obsessively at my latest account of Better Together's onslaught on the intelligence of the Scottish people, so you'll have to wait a day or so for that. Meanwhile, let me ease your frustration by directing you to a small aural treat.

It's Michael Greenwell's latest "For A' That" podcast, recorded on Sunday afternoon, in which I featured along with the infinitely less hungover and more erudite Derek Bateman, Carolyn Leckie and Andrew Tickell, Michael's co-host, whom many of you will know as "Lallands Peat Worrier". If you've got 60 minutes to spare, it's well worth a listen, and by the wonders of the World Wide Web you can do so using this link.

In the podcast, our informal brains trust took stock of the events of the past few days, which included, amongst many other delights:

The Nicola Sturgeon/ Johann Lamont "stairheed rammy" which STV, stretching the boundaries of language to breaking point, had the audacity to term "a "debate". Yes, it was the wrestling throw-down that had undecided voters running screaming for the hills, pleading for the Banshee-like screeching to end. It even had me rocking myself to sleep in the foetal position, trying to convince myself it was just a nightmare, and I'm a Yes supporter, as you may have deduced.

Standard Life making a legally unavoidable and relatively uncontroversial remark about contingency plans in their annual report. All of which would have been hunky dory if certain blood-sucking capitalists and rampant unionists on their board hadn't then got on the phone to Robert Peston to say they'd definitely-maybe-possibly have to abscond from Scotland with a sackful of loot if we opted to decide things for ourselves in future. Of course, any journalist worth his salt would be honour-bound to report that, although possibly not with the glee that erupted like a smirking pox over the faces of Robert and his BBC colleagues. "We wouldn't wish to influence your decision, Scottish voters," murmured Standard Life, nonchalantly releasing the safety catch of the gun they were holding to our heads.

Women for Independence kicking off their campaign to support a voice that, even though it belongs to 52% of the population and might have interesting things to say, isn't always being heard in the maelstrom of the referendum campaign. With even non-fruitcake opinion polls suggesting that women aren't particularly impressed by the Yes campaign so far, Women for Indy have a hugely important task ahead of them. And, now that Nicola and Johann have stunk out the airwaves with "The Worst Goalless Draw Ever", it's probably become exponentially harder!

The explosion of crowd-funding, with Wings Over Scotland proving that if you have something worthwhile to do, and you ask nicely, right-thinking people will throw money at you. And not just you, but any other decent causes for which you might feel inclined to act as signpost. This threw certain hysterical commentators on the No side into a bilious frenzy, which makes the whole thing tremendously satisfying in its own right no matter what these estimable organisations eventually do with the money.

About Me

I'm a writer who returned to Scotland in 2013 after 30+ years in the Home Counties. If you enjoy reading my ramblings, please return often and recommend me to your friends on Twitter, Facebook and Planet Earth. That way someone may one day give me money to do this sort of thing, which would be nice.
william_duguid@hotmail.com